The Pattern of Possibility
by Deplaisance de la Nuit
Summary: In the final victory, after the Adamantine Tower falls – but there is no "after". "After" has become a word without meaning. Indeed, it is difficult to use words at all without attaching the false implication of time. Nonetheless, here is what comes.
1. The Weaving

The calculations are conceived in Valenwood by the last of the Ayleids. When they find Tiber Septim ascended to deity, they ask at once how the disaster may be counteracted. They seek merely a weapon against the ascendant usurpation of Men. What they find is the answer to the problem of problems. What they find is the truth that will break the great deception of Lorkhan.

They manage to break the power of Falinesti with no one the wiser. Two generations – three centuries – pass before the broader stratagem can be put into practice. But it may be said with confidence that this is only a delay. Their last vengeance against the Slave-Queen – the split-second asynchronicity the greatest latter-day Ayleid scholar placed, in secrecy, upon the Red Diamond – has already eliminated one line of Dragonborn kings. It will do the same for the Septims.

When they find that a band of assassins stands ready to eliminate the last four, the last favor of maddened Auri-El on the vermin, they act. They call, in secret, on the likeliest mer they can find: all Altmer of the Summerset Isles, for there they are found in quantity, and positions of power, to make swathes of the map after their image. A few are told all. More, not to be trusted so freely, are simply spurred to conquest such as the Ayleids themselves once enjoyed.

It will all come to the same end.

There are two hitches. First, they had discounted the extent of Dagon's ambition, and that becomes a near thing. Second, there remains a Dragonborn line, and it does not end with Martin Septim. It is certain, at least, that the Seventh Champion of Cyrodiil is not the progenitor. Once, at an early stage, the Thalmor are sure they have found the missing thread, but in the chaos of the Stormcrown Interregnum – hardly an interregnum at all, but a great confusion in the historical eyeblink that it is – the line vanishes once more into shadow.

But the next two centuries are profitable: they have chosen their agents well. By the stratagems of the Thalmor, the Crystal Tower and the Red Mountain are broken, and Valenwood comes out from under the dominion of Man for the first time in nearly five hundred years. The White-Gold Tower may be credited to the Ayleids directly. The Snow Tower – a mere fluctuation in the fabric of time, no machination at all, but it will serve its turn. The Thalmor have proven apt if not complete conquerors, and the strength of Talos is ebbing with every worshipper that dies. The methods of execution have, likely, some Dwemer influence, but the principle is absolutely Ayleid, and works to perfection: those who survive are usually too numbed by terror to continue.

Only the Adamantine Tower remains in full fastness. And after the last Dragonborn is swallowed up by Hermaeus Mora, the last pieces fall into place readily enough.

Cyrodiil and Skyrim, weakened by the rebellion of Ulfric Stormcloak and the assassination of Titus Mede, drop into the Aldmeri Dominion's hand like a swollen plum ready to drop from the stem. Their spies have been swarming through the territories unhindered for decades, after all, tasked with more than simply hunting out heretics – though that has proved reason enough for most of these humans to refrain from impeding their movements. The Ayleids never paused to mark which humans had actually won the war in Skyrim. The only significance was in the bloodshed, in making certain that the thirty years since the first attempt did not allow a new full flower of fighting men to greet them.

With the last remnants of Empire, Talos, too, is extinguished. Every image of Talos is broken – the man, the dragon, the hammer. Every Dragon Banner is burned. The diamond on the doors of the Imperial City is chiseled out. The executions continue, of course – for who would have it any other way? – but, from a cosmological perspective, they have become superfluous. And while the Ayleids know full well that Talos is no longer the only problem, that the last Septim has followed the first into deity, the forgetful humans never learned it. As Lorkhan himself has proven, a god without worshippers is no obstacle at all, and the shrine is the sole seat of worship.

Politically, High Rock is the softer means of approach to the main goal. But the emissaries and generals of the Thalmor, without whom the Ayleids and those who have learned their wisdom are powerless, wish instead to exact revenge on Hammerfell for its defiance. Plans can, fortunately, be drawn up accordingly. First hired corsairs harry Hammerfell's ships to the west. Then the Thalmor, having restored the old knowledge of the Aldmeri warship, begin their true naval invasion, and at the same time beset Hammerfell from the conquered east.

All the while, the main front is far from any shore. A long-forgotten portal leads directly to Hammerfell from the heart of Valenwood.

A good many of the Ayleid masters pass through this portal. They have long been content to survey many of the developments from afar, or in Valenwood itself, but this is the last stage. This, they wish to see in the flesh.

It is good fortune that they do. The stone of the Adamantine Tower, vaulted in that Tower itself, is safeguarded not only by a complex and deadly key but by a ripple in Time itself – a split-second asynchronicity, a mirror to the curse laid on the Red Diamond, operating to favor rather than thwart the binding of Auri-El. Only the Ayleids possess the knowledge to reverse it and expose the stone. The only precaution is to ensure the Redguards are sufficiently occupied elsewhere that they do not come in force to the northeastern shore. An easy task, and soon accomplished.

In the final victory, after the Adamantine Tower falls – but there is no "after". "After" has become a word without meaning. Indeed, it is difficult to use words at all without attaching the false implication of time.

Nonetheless, here is what comes.


	2. The Holes

The calculations make a beautiful chain of reasoning. When the Aedra, the Ancestors, are unbound from the world with the uncoupling of Auri-El's chains, they are preserved from its destruction, and their existence preserves their descendants.

Every direct descendant of the Aedra remains. Life and death – there is little more distinction. Each soul is a whole, drawn into the timeless eternity. The mere creations, the mistakes, never were.

The end of Lorkhan's deception comes to every instant at once. Not as an instant itself – there is far too much to end – but as the dousing of a small flame, that leaves first ember, then smoke, then nothing at all.

Toward the linear end, when the complications have reached their peak, the extinguishing comes to each instant in perhaps ten seconds.

* * *

The end comes for Talos.

It comes for Hjalti; for the General Talos; for the Emperor Tiber Septim at table, plotting his campaign against the Second Dominion; for the god at the height of his strength, father of a dynasty, defender of a continent.

It comes for Talos, his line extinguished, his Empire overrun, his power broken on Nirn. In the fastness of Sovngarde he sits, still enthroned, and his martyrs are his closest attendants. Only the power to observe the mortal world is left to him; he knows well enough what is to come. He has seen the possible defenses against it, seen them forsaken one by one. But he has not, even now, resigned himself to oblivion, and the feasting and drinking go on more fiercely than ever.

He shouts defiance the instant he feels the pain of the corrosion. He sees his faithful dead seared away into nothingness: the favoring touch of Auri-El can only grant him two more seconds of existence.

Even as he comes undone, he refutes the end in his teeth.

* * *

The end comes for Ri'saadh – for Ma'saadh the Anequine cup-bearer boy, chafing under the obstreperous tongue of a Khajiit grandee who herself chafes under the threats of a Thalmor emissary; for Saadh (Dar'saadh to his friends) as he sings a rollicking bit of nonsense for his supper in a Leyawiin County manor and quietly marks the value of the things under the thick dust on the mantelpiece; for Ri'saadh in the encampment outside Solitude, when he is told by a man, in a tide fleeing the gates, that Elisif is dead and the elves are pouring into the city seemingly through the very earth.

It comes for Ri'saadh on the roads of Skyrim, as he regales the mousy-haired Nord family, fellow-travelers to the next crossroads, with tales of Elsweyr. Nords, Ri'saadh finds, do not have much concern for the world beyond their borders, and though Ri'saadh was not yet born when Elsweyr bent and broke for the Thalmor "saviors", Nords are not usually likely to notice the discrepancy. It makes them good company, when they are company at all – restful, and excellent for a polishing of the tongue.

At once he bends over double, stricken with pain. When he unbends himself to see through the haze, he has no cause to miss his human companions. Even in memory, they never were. His mind is like gossamer stretched and beginning to rend – only half-real, like a thing eaten away by a nightmare – and the pain is a constant, and he sees that the other Khajiit of his caravan are staggering, and that he can see right through the hides on their backs, a jug of wine gleaming through that carried by J'datharr – and he can see through their bodies – his own hands-

This is an unforeseen error. It was entirely expected in the case of mer whose souls have been consumed – and, very luckily, it extends also to the dragons who suffered the same fate, particularly Alduin – but it has never been considered that the Khajiit were truly of the Aedra; the Thalmor employ it as a mere legal fiction; Ayleids do not even do that. And that creation could nonetheless alter them so deeply at their essence that their descent cannot fully preserve them – again, unforeseen.

But it is done. There can be no foreseeing now. Nor regrets: regret looks backward, and there is no backward direction in which to look. Pain-wracked, half unmade, the Khajiit are drawn into the timeless.

* * *

The end comes for Ancano.

It takes him as a melancholy young mer in the crowd at Alinor Square as the deposed High Queen is executed, knowing the implications but not caring: all the works of mortals perish. It takes him as a conscript into the Dominion's battlemages, smiling in the corridors of the palace as he hears his promise whispered of: great magic, unhindered by scruple. It takes him as a key agent in the wilds of Valenwood, soon after the rebellion, summoned to the home of the Ayleid Nadevalanto.

And it takes him as hapless old Tolfdir brings his prize from Saarthal, painstakingly up the steep slope. All the power of Alteration in Skyrim – half of that Ancano's – must be brought to bear to get the great orb to the chamber without tearing the College apart in the process.

The Eye of Magnus. And falling into his hands. Ancano must show some of his eagerness in his face, for the face of Nirya beside him is putting on a good show of it. Young, vain, ambitious, always on the lookout for the right coattails to climb – there are thousands such in Alinor. She does not know much and is not to be trusted with more, but she cannot help but know that Ancano is one whose favor means something.

The end takes him, and burns him from the pattern.

He had no way of knowing. The Thalmor, still less. Even his great-grandmother did not imagine her dalliance with the Breton legionnaire had given her her second son. But one solid thread removes him from the Aedra, and that thread must unravel his existence.

In that moment of pain before he is gone, he sees Nirya unscathed and perplexed, and smiles bitterly at the irony. For he knows well enough what must be happening. And who could be responsible save Ancano himself?

* * *

The end comes for Elenwen.

Elenwen the bright girl, scanning a journal kept by her father's latest servant while she keeps him occupied with the moulding-boards –

Elenwen the beautiful Lord's daughter, laughing merrily at the wittier execution placards they come up with at the mountain outposts, where they still see regular fight from the mer who won't give up their dead Crown Prince, and formalities are dispensed with –

Elenwen the seasoned Agent in the depths of Vindasel, drawing a key from the pouch at her hip, prepared for her last audience with the son of Eastmarch –

Lady Elenwen, rewarded for her work in the subjugation of Skyrim, borne by carriage to a high post in the Imperial City where she hopes she may partake in all the fun she missed in the last occupation –

Elenwen, Aldmeri to the core, will outlast the world.

So, too, Elenwen the First Emissary to Skyrim. She is in Castle Dour, listening gravely to that special military governor Mede has brought in – or rather she is listening with distinct amusement to the idiot's obsequious prattle, but grave all the same: she has not yet heard that the asset who gave Ulfric Stormcloak ideas about the loyalties of High King Torygg has been dealt with. There is every reason to expect that the loose end will be tied up, but she can't help but remember the fate of the Lady Arranelya, who held similar confidence during the Hammerfell campaign.

She was never trusted with the highest knowledge. She, like most of the Thalmor, has too much love for dominion over the physical and the temporal, and that such a one might sabotage any plans to cast off the world entirely cannot be discounted. But her end, nonetheless, is of a piece with that of the Ayleid masters.

When General Tullius vanishes in flame, eyes widening, finger almost poised to point at her – vanishes along with the legionnaires at the doorway – Elenwen is astonished, and then filled with triumph. She may not have had a hand in it, but the sight is a treat, all the same. Then there is no more castle; she stands on Solitude's plaza, deserted except for Thalmor, and she shouts with glee. And then there is no more Solitude, the mer stand on the cliffside above the lashing sea – and the feeling of triumph dissolves into confusion.

What precisely is it that she has triumphed over?

* * *

The end comes for Ocato.

It comes for Ocato as a youth in Firsthold, a cross-provincial hodgepodge of a city where you can scarce scratch your nose without clearing it with an Altmer council, and then a Bosmer one; he is madly devouring a spellbook that will help him get to Battlespire, where, unless court-martialed, he need never see another council in his life.

It comes for Ocato at his camp on Auridon in the War of Blue Strait, when the fair-haired young man he has rescued from the stone schoolhouse, a favorite among the troops, hears that the Altmer celebrate their birth once a decade; the boy replies without guile that, in Cyrodiil, they celebrate _two_ birthdays a year, one for yourself and one for the family, and Ocato realizes ( _no no no don't send to my parents they put me there_ ) who this boy must be.

It comes for Ocato as he stands on the steps of the Imperial Palace, issuing hollow-ringing assurances that the Empire must continue as normal and the assassins will be found. Ebel's corpse lies not two hundred feet from his back.

It comes for Ocato as he dies on the sword of a Thalmor catspaw, dies that the Empire may die with him.

And it comes for Ocato as he kneels in the Council Chamber before his new Emperor. Martin Septim's Dunmer champion relaxes from a martial stance which Ocato now realizes was meant for _him_ rather than any potential assassin – or is there actual confusion between the two? Soon as this Oblivion affair is done with, best advise the Emperor to make her Champion of Cyrodiil. From all he's heard of the man, he's not one to take credit even where it is due him; he'll simply tell her whose idea it was, and the misunderstanding ought to fall by the wayside.

Martin Septim is entirely green to rule, he knows. But the raw materials – his courage, compassion, charisma – they promise that Ocato may give over the regency in perhaps two years at most. With any luck, he might in due course retire from public life entirely. And even if he misjudges Martin's potential, the simple act of lighting the Dragonfires and shaking off this invasion will still be well worth any-

Flares burst all over the periphery of Ocato's vision. The Emperor is burning.

The Hero of Kvatch immediately casts a powerful restorative spell. There is no difference. Her eyes say there is no difference.

"No time," Martin gasps. He turns back to the door, though it clearly pains him, the Hero striding at once to his side. "We must get to the Tem-"

He is no more. Only the Amulet is left to clatter to the floor – and that not for long.

They cannot, of course, know what has transpired. Their thoughts turn naturally to Dagon. All they know is the first horror and disbelief, the beginnings of the full realization that he is dead, and the world lost. And well before that can ripen, he is removed from even their memories.

They pause, uncomprehending and bewildered, as the erasures mount. The palace guards, the Blades of Cloud Ruler, Savlian Matius, nearly the full court of Cyrodiil, the Breton couple that raised a foundling Dunmer girl – these are gone from thought before Martin is gone from existence. There was never an assassination; there was never an Emperor Uriel or a Prince Ebel to assassinate. There was never a Kvatch. There was never an Empire. There was never an Akavir, never an Alessia, never such a thing as man.

In the last moment of Nirn, the two mer stand staring and naked in an empty room, under a bone-white dome which means nothing to them.

Do not say that they have lost everything. Their spirits are preserved. Ocato remains as he was: dutiful, practical, irascible. His nameless companion remains fiercely just, passionately loyal.

But there is no more cause for these things. They are swords that never knew a forge.

* * *

The barriers between the realms of Aetherius dissolve into vapor. Aetherius itself falls into what was once Nirn. The realms of Oblivion remain separate from one another – the works of the daedra remain – but all run freely into the new void.

There must, theoretically, be a process, a series of actions, to build the new state of being. But where all souls move without hindrance through time and space, where even death (though it still comes to mortals) means but a slight readjustment in location, the process is not a thing that can be perceived, and certainly cannot _have been_. Reality has already and always coalesced to what infinitely approaches a single point: every soul, in all places, at all times, doing all things.

Half-existent cat-wraiths and mer, dragons and dremora, the lost whose nature is of the never-was and the moored whose nature is of the ever-present, the cruel and the innocent and the just, from the Dawn Era to the Fourth – each is in the company of all, having had, having still, an infinity of every interaction lying in their nature.

Not one mortal soul comprehends, not one even perceives, what never was. They might have devoted every decade of their life to pave the way for this existence, or never known, or fought the Thalmor to the bitter end, but it makes no difference.

The daedra retain knowledge only of the few creations of Nirn that passed briefly into their own realms outside creation. These they regard as inexplicable oddities, and do not allow to become cause for concern.

But the Aedra, the source of the stream, are of necessity preserved in totality – including every bit of their mind. They, alone, see with clarity.

Phynaster and Xarxes are glad to have forsworn their mistake. So far as mortal loyalties are won in the infinite aggregate, they have won them. The souls of the highest Thalmor, they find disappointingly half-hearted, as much consorting with Daedric Princes as with their own enfeebled gods. The Ayleids are truer, more bound to traditions, and those Ayleids who honored the Aedra in creation honor them outside it as well. The common rank and file bow down. But the most fervent acolytes, they find, come of the early Dominions and the human Empires – and the latter case is endlessly amusing.

Most of the Aedra are regretful – regretful to lose their place, regretful to have lost their power to begin with, resigned to obscurity. Zenithar, who carved his meaning entirely in matter and time, is barely noted in the common omnipresence, scarcely speaking, a woebegone little spirit.

But to Mother Mara, to Stendarr the Merciful, to Auri-El whose ears are never to hear the name of Akatosh from mortal tongue – those who truly loved the souls that never were and never can be – every moment is one, and the moment is memory, and the memory is bitter sorrow. But there is no return, and no making anew. Lorkhan lies as he has for long ages in time, a barely-living husk. Were Lorkhan and the three of them at their first strength, it would not be enough. And they are not at that strength. There is not enough power remaining in all the Aedra to forge in their blood even the pale shadows of creation, the lands and things of the Oblivion realms.

Nirn was to be made once and for all. It can never be again.

It is outside the pattern of possibility.


End file.
